I had heard that the biggest problem with either sequencing the dog's DNA or cloning a dog (the Missyplicity project) was the comparatively large number of chromosomes. In fact, a National Geographic article titled "Wolf to Woof" (tiny excerpt available here) notes the dog's 78 chromosomes (compared with our measly 46) as one of the reasons you can group a Great Dane and a Pomeranian as part of the same species.
I'm a cat person, myself. Cats, being contrary by nature, allowed themselves to be cloned, but then came out looking completely different because coat color and pattern is determined after conception.
I know a lot of people here think this can fight abduction. But how?
Thank you -- you summed it up perfectly, at least for the US implementation. Every year, sometimes more than once, some company bribes the cash-strapped school district to send home ident-a-kit signups. In fact, this started when the kids were babies in day care.
I've never signed up, and the kids are now old enough that they ask why. I tell them that for one thing, having their fingerprints won't keep them safe -- it'll just help identify the body. The older kids know more of the implications -- including the fact that the police fingerprint criminals, and my kids aren't criminals. At least, not under the pre-Ashcroft Constitution...
We live nearby, so I took the kids to Nacogdoches to see the huge flower. On Saturday (7/10), the plant (named Jack, as previously noted) was 4'10" and had started to slow down. We and Dawn (the research assistant) noticed that Jack was starting to ooze a bit of fluid, and Dawn speculated that the Big Event was about to occur -- the oozing may have been some overflow from the chemical cocktail brewing inside.
Sunday, Jack's frills began to open, and by Monday night, he/she was in bloom. We're not making the drive again, but the pictures are great. Here's a link to the photo gallery (let's see how their IS department holds up):
The best thing about driving to Deep East Texas to see the flower: there's no crowds, no lines, no big-city hoopla (I'd have never known if it weren't for Slashdot). Just you, the researchers, a rather rickety greenhouse, and a very, very large plant.
From the article: If you're tempted, just remember Prince Joe who's still sending e-mails saying he's sticking to his promise and saying the daily prayer: "When all above seems a great test, Get on down with the Holy Red Breast."
Foo: Today's "Reality shows" remind me of the government-run pornography industry in Orwell's 1984 -- a handy way to distract the masses from reality (election? what election?). Bar: No, that's what professional sports are for. But then, I'd argue that most people are stupid by nature, without any assistance from the government.
That's how it works, I think... most of us sheeple have a fixed amount of thought-process available for non-essential pursuits. If those processes are tied up processing sports/pr0n/reality-TV, then they're not available for politics and/or joining a protest mob.
Hey, I wonder if autopr0n has any new sites today? Baa!
(Actually, using the words "baa" and "autopr0n" in the same posting might not be such a good idea...)
From the SFGate.com article's subhead: 3 no-nos bleeped from new crime drama -- Richard Dreyfuss blasts government censorship
And further down the article: The cuts prompted executive producer and writer David Black and Dreyfuss to whip out prepared statements before facing the nation's TV critics here on Friday.
Tonight on PBS: the world's smallest violin plays "My Heart Bleeds For You".
I'm no fan of corporate-owned media, and the whoring of the airwaves by the likes of FOX. Today's "Reality shows" remind me of the government-run pornography industry in Orwell's 1984 -- a handy way to distract the masses from reality (election? what election?).
But I doubt that "Cop Shop" is going to be the poster boy for government interference with free speech. I suspect that the star and producer have no higher goal than propping up their show's ratings. They had a prepared statement -- the press release crying "censorship" was composed before the show was even screened. That tells me that the show needs propping up by the controversy, because it's likely to fall down under its own pompous weight.
Has anyone been tracking Firefox/Mozilla in the User-Agent stats for a large site to see if it is truly pulling browsershare from IE?
Well, when I linked to a little-viewed page on my site (during a discussion of poker, really!), the stats showed a surprising number of non-IE visitors. It seemed to be about half IE, half Opera, Mozilla, and the like. An awful lot of visitors weren't using Windows, either.
That means either 1) Slashdot visitors use alternate browsers and OS's, or 2) Slashdot visitors like to modify their browsers' User-Agent strings. With this crowd, I'd think both are equally likely.
A stuck switch? The "vent-suit-atmosphere" switch perhaps? What kind of half-assed situation is this? They don't have enough telemetry to determine if a switch (or circuit) is on or off at a given point in time?
Well, you could have telemetry on every circuit. In fact, that's the NASA way -- every switch and circuit breaker has a telemetry unit, and that unit probably feeds another unit that sends back telemetry about the telemetry.
And before long, you have... the NASA EVA suit, which is 1) too big to fit through the Russian airlock and 2) currently unusable because of some obscure combination of tiny faults.
So instead of using the overengineered NASA suits, the astronauts were forced to use the brute-force-engineered Russian suits. One suit developed a problem, because in space, Stuff Still Happens.
Here we are, less than a week later, and we know what happened to the Russian suit. The NASA suits, meanwhile, are still floating around like weightless paperweights, and are just as useless.
I have to chalk this one up to the limited-telemetry brute-force Russian design. It ain't pretty, but it works.
Something tells me......that the winner is just going to have a really hot, photogenic girlfriend;)
You mean, perhaps like Mick Jagger and former "Page 3 girl" Jeri Hall?
I was going to find a link, but I'm at work, so I can't really search for the appropriate picture. However, Jeri Hall is said to have been wooed by a peculiar Texas custom (link probably suitable for work). I was in Oklahoma during high school, so I guess that's why I'd never heard of this ritual.
Yes. At least, they certainly do for recent patents. Google for "sequencing facility".
Wow. I just tried out one of the Google results, browsed through the "Sample Preparation" and "FAQ" sections, and learned (once again) just how little I know.
I officially put my own genetic code under the terms of the LGPL. You can redistribute me and my clones as you like...
Funny post, but it brings up an interesting point. Biotech companies are patenting gene sequences all the time. What's to *stop* you, or me, or CowboyNeal from filing a patent for "A unique sequence of genetic material such that will produce a particular individual, to wit, me?"
Do the biotech companies know the exact sequence of GTCA's in the genes they patent? If not, then I don't see any reason a human individual couldn't patent his/her/hir own 46 chromosomes (+/-).
And it did work as designed... a clear demonstration that should win even more future safety-weary customers/passengers.
I know it's just a typo -- you meant safety-wary, I'm sure -- but it's very apropos.
I'm safety-weary, myself. I'm tired of everything having to be 100% safe and boring. My kids know not to jump off the top of the slide, but because some kids don't, you hardly ever see the old-school metal slide with a narrow set of steps and a steep drop at the end.
On the grownup side, all Rutan's test pilots know that they're strapping themselves to a very large firecracker that could as easily go BOOM as not. They know the risks, and accept them. I hope we'll continue to see more willingness to take a personal risk when the rewards are justified. That's where heroes come from.
First off, if you have your own personal domain, you won't NEED to change the email account name.
Totally agree with all your points, but just this week I discovered the boundless limits of human ignorance.
My daughter's boyfriend claims to know all there is to know about computers (and everything else: he's a teenager, after all). So I offered to set him up with an email account on my hosting (not the same as owning your own physical server, but close enough for my needs). I told him that he wouldn't have to worry about long, hard-to-remember AOL or Hotmail or Yahoo login names -- pick something simple.
He comes back with "darkmagik##########", where "#" is a long, meaningless (to me) string of numbers. I tell him there's no way I'm putting crap like that on my server. I also let him know that darkmagik.com is available, and he could be anything@darkmagik.com.
The International Space Station will be flying high above Mojave at approximately the time SpaceShipOne is scheduled to launch. The Expedition 9 resident crew will attempt to photograph the launch and contrail.
The ISS crew, likely to be remembered as caretakers of NASA's failed scheme, will be witness to the future of space exploration. Poetic, isn't it?
It also occurs to me that if something bad happens to the Russian space program, the ISS crew may have to wait for Rutan's future orbital project, if they hope to get home at all...
Since the description said "if you like to...", I figured I could include my mid-'80s TRS-80 coding skillz as the old-school equivalent of compiling your Linux kernel.
BTW, I'm not talking about using EDTASM (editor/assembler)... my first Z80 coding was in binary. You'd have an opcode like 101xxx11, where xxx depends on which register you're referencing, and I'd plug in the bits, convert to decimal, and POKE the routine into memory. Saving before running was essential, but painful -- all I had was cassette tape storage.
And I walked to school, too! In the snow! Uphill! Both ways!!!
Since $3,000+ is a bit outside my range (my range being closer my $35 PII Linux box), I naturally checked out the Emperor Linux Jobs Page to see if I could suppliment my income. What a blast from the pre-bust past, mixed with a bit of post-bust reality:
Work at EmperorLinux: the most fun you can have with...
EmperorLinux is not actively hiring.
However, we are always on the lookout for fun and knowledgeable people who like things Linux. If you like to: ride your bike to work, hike in the mountains, recompile your kernel weekly, drink Mountain Dew with extra sugar, play in the dirt with your hands, make fun and informative web pages, use the "taste test" when debugging circuits, run with scissors barefoot in the rain, or anything similarly off-center,
send us an interesting mail telling us why you think we would like you.
I've done nearly all of those things, if you can substitute "hand-code Z80 machine code" for "recompile your kernel". But I think I'll stick with my boring but very stable job coding VB in the tax accounting business. I'll have time to lick random circuitry when I retire.
Foo:Try posting a story about Firefox 0.9 being out today. It has been amazing me all day that nobody has submitted a story yet. Bar:I did. It got rejected in approximately a half-hour.
Actually, that story was out yesterday. Evidence here.
No excuse for this dupe, though. Must be summer in the Northern Hemisphere again.
It's not part of their handful of remotely-programmed formats. They acquired it because it already had a license to broadcast at that frequency. When they needed the frequency, they killed it.
You've got a point, there. Of course, that makes it a tossup between "corrupted by money and political connections" and "corrupted by money and more money".
It also means that Tulsa's legendary KMOD, now owned by you-know-who, could go the way of KELI any day.
You can blame Bush all you want.. but Kerry feels the same way about it.
You are exactly right. As bad as Bush is, on most core issues, there's hardly a flicker of difference between the two halves of our one-party system. That's why I'm voting for the Green Party candidate (hopefully David Cobb).
Here in Dallas, we've lost our last Hard Rock station, Clear Channel's 97.1 The Eagle. They turned it into Sunny 97.1, playing a fully automated mix of 70s and 80s. My 13-year-old daughter and all her friends were devastated, but I told her it's really pretty simple.
It's George W's fault.
Clear Channel vice-head-honcho Tom Hicks made Dubya a rich man indeed when he bought the Texas Rangers from Bush's ownership group. That freed up Bush to run for Governor, and the rest, as they say, is history (though he was a decent governor, as they go). Short story: Hicks and Bush are buds.
Now, you have Janet Jackson's Right Breast suddenly stirring up the bible-thumpers (the ones that give us Christians a bad image). Fired up, they went after an easy target -- the shock jocks that Clear Channel and others put on the air to cover up the fact that their corporate music sucks.
Bush calls Hicks with a proposal: act like they're sorry, pay a little fine, shut down some jocks and stations, so that the bible thumpers will feel like they've won. Bush gets his base energized, and Hicks gets buddy Bush re-elected.
And for the icing on the cake, Clear Channel turns off the last rock station in conservative Dallas.
They'd been letting it rot in the ratings for years (details here), so they had an excuse. So maybe my tinfoil hat is on too tight. But if they'd supported the music, KEGL would have *had* ratings... and top 15 in the Dallas market still isn't anything to sneeze at.
Bottom line: Republican politics killed Rock in Dallas. The Eagle joins Q102 and The Zoo in radio oblivion.
Slashdot Mirror
I had heard that the biggest problem with either sequencing the dog's DNA or cloning a dog (the Missyplicity project) was the comparatively large number of chromosomes. In fact, a National Geographic article titled "Wolf to Woof" (tiny excerpt available here) notes the dog's 78 chromosomes (compared with our measly 46) as one of the reasons you can group a Great Dane and a Pomeranian as part of the same species.
I'm a cat person, myself. Cats, being contrary by nature, allowed themselves to be cloned, but then came out looking completely different because coat color and pattern is determined after conception.
I know a lot of people here think this can fight abduction. But how?
Thank you -- you summed it up perfectly, at least for the US implementation. Every year, sometimes more than once, some company bribes the cash-strapped school district to send home ident-a-kit signups. In fact, this started when the kids were babies in day care.
I've never signed up, and the kids are now old enough that they ask why. I tell them that for one thing, having their fingerprints won't keep them safe -- it'll just help identify the body. The older kids know more of the implications -- including the fact that the police fingerprint criminals, and my kids aren't criminals. At least, not under the pre-Ashcroft Constitution...
We live nearby, so I took the kids to Nacogdoches to see the huge flower. On Saturday (7/10), the plant (named Jack, as previously noted) was 4'10" and had started to slow down. We and Dawn (the research assistant) noticed that Jack was starting to ooze a bit of fluid, and Dawn speculated that the Big Event was about to occur -- the oozing may have been some overflow from the chemical cocktail brewing inside.
Sunday, Jack's frills began to open, and by Monday night, he/she was in bloom. We're not making the drive again, but the pictures are great. Here's a link to the photo gallery (let's see how their IS department holds up):
jackpics.htm
The best thing about driving to Deep East Texas to see the flower: there's no crowds, no lines, no big-city hoopla (I'd have never known if it weren't for Slashdot). Just you, the researchers, a rather rickety greenhouse, and a very, very large plant.
From the article:
If you're tempted, just remember Prince Joe who's still sending e-mails saying he's sticking to his promise and saying the daily prayer: "When all above seems a great test, Get on down with the Holy Red Breast."
w00t! Where do I join?
Foo: Today's "Reality shows" remind me of the government-run pornography industry in Orwell's 1984 -- a handy way to distract the masses from reality (election? what election?).
Bar: No, that's what professional sports are for. But then, I'd argue that most people are stupid by nature, without any assistance from the government.
That's how it works, I think... most of us sheeple have a fixed amount of thought-process available for non-essential pursuits. If those processes are tied up processing sports/pr0n/reality-TV, then they're not available for politics and/or joining a protest mob.
Hey, I wonder if autopr0n has any new sites today? Baa!
(Actually, using the words "baa" and "autopr0n" in the same posting might not be such a good idea...)
From the SFGate.com article's subhead:
3 no-nos bleeped from new crime drama -- Richard Dreyfuss blasts government censorship
And further down the article:
The cuts prompted executive producer and writer David Black and Dreyfuss to whip out prepared statements before facing the nation's TV critics here on Friday.
Tonight on PBS: the world's smallest violin plays "My Heart Bleeds For You".
I'm no fan of corporate-owned media, and the whoring of the airwaves by the likes of FOX. Today's "Reality shows" remind me of the government-run pornography industry in Orwell's 1984 -- a handy way to distract the masses from reality (election? what election?).
But I doubt that "Cop Shop" is going to be the poster boy for government interference with free speech. I suspect that the star and producer have no higher goal than propping up their show's ratings. They had a prepared statement -- the press release crying "censorship" was composed before the show was even screened. That tells me that the show needs propping up by the controversy, because it's likely to fall down under its own pompous weight.
Of course, I could be wrong...
Has anyone been tracking Firefox/Mozilla in the User-Agent stats for a large site to see if it is truly pulling browsershare from IE?
Well, when I linked to a little-viewed page on my site (during a discussion of poker, really!), the stats showed a surprising number of non-IE visitors. It seemed to be about half IE, half Opera, Mozilla, and the like. An awful lot of visitors weren't using Windows, either.
That means either 1) Slashdot visitors use alternate browsers and OS's, or 2) Slashdot visitors like to modify their browsers' User-Agent strings. With this crowd, I'd think both are equally likely.
Human beings are over 11 times as radioactive as natural uranium, and even more radioactive than U-238.
Don't tell Ashcroft. He'll round us all up as "nuclear suicide bombers"!
(my, aren't I cynical today?)
we could always move Venus out to Mars's orbit, and have Mars smash into it. Poof! Instant new Earth.
"Hey, it worked for me!" -God
A stuck switch?
The "vent-suit-atmosphere" switch perhaps?
What kind of half-assed situation is this?
They don't have enough telemetry to determine if a switch (or circuit) is on or off at a given point in time?
Well, you could have telemetry on every circuit. In fact, that's the NASA way -- every switch and circuit breaker has a telemetry unit, and that unit probably feeds another unit that sends back telemetry about the telemetry.
And before long, you have... the NASA EVA suit, which is 1) too big to fit through the Russian airlock and 2) currently unusable because of some obscure combination of tiny faults.
So instead of using the overengineered NASA suits, the astronauts were forced to use the brute-force-engineered Russian suits. One suit developed a problem, because in space, Stuff Still Happens.
Here we are, less than a week later, and we know what happened to the Russian suit. The NASA suits, meanwhile, are still floating around like weightless paperweights, and are just as useless.
I have to chalk this one up to the limited-telemetry brute-force Russian design. It ain't pretty, but it works.
Something tells me... ...that the winner is just going to have a really hot, photogenic girlfriend ;)
You mean, perhaps like Mick Jagger and former "Page 3 girl" Jeri Hall?
I was going to find a link, but I'm at work, so I can't really search for the appropriate picture. However, Jeri Hall is said to have been wooed by a peculiar Texas custom (link probably suitable for work). I was in Oklahoma during high school, so I guess that's why I'd never heard of this ritual.
Yes. At least, they certainly do for recent patents. Google for "sequencing facility".
Wow. I just tried out one of the Google results, browsed through the "Sample Preparation" and "FAQ" sections, and learned (once again) just how little I know.
I feel suitably humbled now.
I officially put my own genetic code under the terms of the LGPL. You can redistribute me and my clones as you like...
Funny post, but it brings up an interesting point. Biotech companies are patenting gene sequences all the time. What's to *stop* you, or me, or CowboyNeal from filing a patent for "A unique sequence of genetic material such that will produce a particular individual, to wit, me?"
Do the biotech companies know the exact sequence of GTCA's in the genes they patent? If not, then I don't see any reason a human individual couldn't patent his/her/hir own 46 chromosomes (+/-).
And it did work as designed... a clear demonstration that should win even more future safety-weary customers/passengers.
I know it's just a typo -- you meant safety-wary, I'm sure -- but it's very apropos.
I'm safety-weary, myself. I'm tired of everything having to be 100% safe and boring. My kids know not to jump off the top of the slide, but because some kids don't, you hardly ever see the old-school metal slide with a narrow set of steps and a steep drop at the end.
On the grownup side, all Rutan's test pilots know that they're strapping themselves to a very large firecracker that could as easily go BOOM as not. They know the risks, and accept them. I hope we'll continue to see more willingness to take a personal risk when the rewards are justified. That's where heroes come from.
You're not running for office here. We expect at least one correct fact in a post. If you just want to bash NASA, try Salon.
You must be new here. Welcome to Slashdot! Enjoy your visit.
The ISS has lifeboats with enough capacity to get everyone down without help from Earth.
/me <face color=red />
Good point. I guess I just got caught up in the moment!
When I got to the top, I released a bag of M&Ms in the cockpit. It was absolutely amazing. M&Ms were going all around. It was so cool!
M&M's: the milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your cockpit at 100km above the Earth!
First off, if you have your own personal domain, you won't NEED to change the email account name.
Totally agree with all your points, but just this week I discovered the boundless limits of human ignorance.
My daughter's boyfriend claims to know all there is to know about computers (and everything else: he's a teenager, after all). So I offered to set him up with an email account on my hosting (not the same as owning your own physical server, but close enough for my needs). I told him that he wouldn't have to worry about long, hard-to-remember AOL or Hotmail or Yahoo login names -- pick something simple.
He comes back with "darkmagik##########", where "#" is a long, meaningless (to me) string of numbers. I tell him there's no way I'm putting crap like that on my server. I also let him know that darkmagik.com is available, and he could be anything@darkmagik.com.
He then says that he's fine, he's got Yahoo's IM.
I throw in the towel.
My favorite update so far is this one:
1250 GMT (8:50 a.m. EDT)
The International Space Station will be flying high above Mojave at approximately the time SpaceShipOne is scheduled to launch. The Expedition 9 resident crew will attempt to photograph the launch and contrail.
The ISS crew, likely to be remembered as caretakers of NASA's failed scheme, will be witness to the future of space exploration. Poetic, isn't it?
It also occurs to me that if something bad happens to the Russian space program, the ISS crew may have to wait for Rutan's future orbital project, if they hope to get home at all...
You code Z80 weekly?
Yes, very weakly. [rimshot]
Since the description said "if you like to...", I figured I could include my mid-'80s TRS-80 coding skillz as the old-school equivalent of compiling your Linux kernel.
BTW, I'm not talking about using EDTASM (editor/assembler)... my first Z80 coding was in binary. You'd have an opcode like 101xxx11, where xxx depends on which register you're referencing, and I'd plug in the bits, convert to decimal, and POKE the routine into memory. Saving before running was essential, but painful -- all I had was cassette tape storage.
And I walked to school, too! In the snow! Uphill! Both ways!!!
Since $3,000+ is a bit outside my range (my range being closer my $35 PII Linux box), I naturally checked out the Emperor Linux Jobs Page to see if I could suppliment my income. What a blast from the pre-bust past, mixed with a bit of post-bust reality:
...
Work at EmperorLinux: the most fun you can have with
EmperorLinux is not actively hiring.
However, we are always on the lookout for fun and knowledgeable people who like things Linux. If you like to:
ride your bike to work,
hike in the mountains,
recompile your kernel weekly,
drink Mountain Dew with extra sugar,
play in the dirt with your hands,
make fun and informative web pages,
use the "taste test" when debugging circuits,
run with scissors barefoot in the rain,
or anything similarly off-center,
send us an interesting mail telling us why you think we would like you.
I've done nearly all of those things, if you can substitute "hand-code Z80 machine code" for "recompile your kernel". But I think I'll stick with my boring but very stable job coding VB in the tax accounting business. I'll have time to lick random circuitry when I retire.
Foo: Try posting a story about Firefox 0.9 being out today. It has been amazing me all day that nobody has submitted a story yet.
Bar: I did. It got rejected in approximately a half-hour.
Actually, that story was out yesterday. Evidence here.
No excuse for this dupe, though. Must be summer in the Northern Hemisphere again.
It's not part of their handful of remotely-programmed formats. They acquired it because it already had a license to broadcast at that frequency. When they needed the frequency, they killed it.
You've got a point, there. Of course, that makes it a tossup between "corrupted by money and political connections" and "corrupted by money and more money".
It also means that Tulsa's legendary KMOD, now owned by you-know-who, could go the way of KELI any day.
You can blame Bush all you want.. but Kerry feels the same way about it.
You are exactly right. As bad as Bush is, on most core issues, there's hardly a flicker of difference between the two halves of our one-party system. That's why I'm voting for the Green Party candidate (hopefully David Cobb).
Of course, YMMV.
Here in Dallas, we've lost our last Hard Rock station, Clear Channel's 97.1 The Eagle. They turned it into Sunny 97.1, playing a fully automated mix of 70s and 80s. My 13-year-old daughter and all her friends were devastated, but I told her it's really pretty simple.
It's George W's fault.
Clear Channel vice-head-honcho Tom Hicks made Dubya a rich man indeed when he bought the Texas Rangers from Bush's ownership group. That freed up Bush to run for Governor, and the rest, as they say, is history (though he was a decent governor, as they go). Short story: Hicks and Bush are buds.
Now, you have Janet Jackson's Right Breast suddenly stirring up the bible-thumpers (the ones that give us Christians a bad image). Fired up, they went after an easy target -- the shock jocks that Clear Channel and others put on the air to cover up the fact that their corporate music sucks.
Bush calls Hicks with a proposal: act like they're sorry, pay a little fine, shut down some jocks and stations, so that the bible thumpers will feel like they've won. Bush gets his base energized, and Hicks gets buddy Bush re-elected.
And for the icing on the cake, Clear Channel turns off the last rock station in conservative Dallas.
They'd been letting it rot in the ratings for years (details here), so they had an excuse. So maybe my tinfoil hat is on too tight. But if they'd supported the music, KEGL would have *had* ratings... and top 15 in the Dallas market still isn't anything to sneeze at.
Bottom line: Republican politics killed Rock in Dallas. The Eagle joins Q102 and The Zoo in radio oblivion.